Song of a Reformed Headhunter

So grateful for H. L. Hix's clarifying review of INSPECTOR INSPECTOR in Stride Magazine. He found the throughline in all the poetic sequences of the book. I will be reading his final paragraph again and again with much joy and satisfaction.  "The phrases in Inspector Inspector, themselves all carefully chosen, do not reduce to one refrain, but they do reinforce certain thematic concerns, most prominently the will that applies to all the persons in the book (father, son, lovers, Singaporeans…), and into which I take the reader to be invited: let us remain alive to one another."   If you'd like to get Inspector2:  US: Bookshop.org UK: Carcanet

Does anyone here remember downelink.com? Granddaddy of Grindr? Wrote a poem about it. And a poem about recycling Roy Lichenstein. Two "Ungovernable Bodies" published at A Gathering of the Tribes (AGOTT). Thanks, Danny Shot, for accepting the poems.

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . I was reading Walter Rodney's essay "The Historical Roots of African Underdevelopment" in  Decolonial Marxism  when I came across this passage: "Central and South American gold and silver played a crucial role in meeting the need for coin in the expanding capitalist money economy, while African gold was also significant in this respect. African gold helped the Portuguese to finance further navigations around the Cape of Good Hope and into Asia; it was the main source for the Dutch mint in the seventeenth century (which helped to secure Amsterdam as the financial capital of Europe in that period); and it is no coincidence that when the English struck a new gold coin in 1663 they called it the 'guinea'."  "What is a guinea?" a student in my seventh-grade English class asked recently. We had just read that the rich old lady Miss Havisham was giving the young Pip twenty-five...